Hacker News Reader

Comment by subbu | Hacker News Reader

Most d3 books out there are entry level. They don't cover advanced concepts which are needed to build serious visualizations. The only way to learn advanced stuff is to go through your bl.ocks, which could be daunting sometimes without comments. It'd be awesome if you can think of writing an advanced book. I know its too much to ask for, especially considering your active contribution on Google Groups and StackOverflow.

View on HN

I’ve made a couple starts on books but so far haven’t been able to stick with it long enough to finish; it becomes too tempting to release content as examples or smaller articles. And while those are useful, too, piecemeal content lacks the cohesiveness / comprehensiveness / depth of a book… so I’ll keep trying and hopefully find a way to make a book in the future.

(And by “book”, I’m including online publications like Mark Pilgrim’s excellent /Dive into HTML5/. I’d almost certainly publish online given the interactive nature of the subject.)

If it would help, I'm 100% positive that a large group of people would be happy to contribute to a kickstarter campaign to raise funds for you to be able to focus on a book and/or further development of d3 for a year. There's been a few successful kickstarters like this already (Hello Ruby book, git-annex project, and many others come to mind), so it can certainly be done (of course this only helps if the main obstacle is the "everyday" work getting in the way).

In any case, thank you for all your work. It's an inspiration.

+1 I would contribute. Seriously you should think of how much money you would need to incentive you to really focus, then quintuple it, then post a kickstarter.

+1 this. I'm on a Kickstarter hiatus right now, but I'd throw into this on Mike Bostock's name alone.

+1. I'd chip in for sure

+1 I'm interested in learning some advance visualization, graphics, animations as well. Any good book recommendation would be appreciated.

I'll throw money at you, for sure!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com